Heterotopia and heterotopology in CA Davids' The Blacks of Cape Town (2013)

CA Davids' sustained preoccupation with the Foucauldian concepts of heterotopia and heterotopology in The Blacks of Cape Town (2013) allows her to inhabit, accommodate, and traverse global, rather than narrowly national, literary imaginaries. This paper demonstrates that heterotopic locations s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSafundi (Nashville, Tenn.) Vol. 18; no. 3; pp. 239 - 257
Main Author van Schalkwyk, Simon
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Philadelphia Routledge 03.07.2017
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
complicity
cosmopolitanism
Employment
entanglement
Gardens & gardening
Heterotopia
Memory
Preoccupation
prison and garden
The Blacks of Cape Town
World history
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Summary:CA Davids' sustained preoccupation with the Foucauldian concepts of heterotopia and heterotopology in The Blacks of Cape Town (2013) allows her to inhabit, accommodate, and traverse global, rather than narrowly national, literary imaginaries. This paper demonstrates that heterotopic locations such as the garden, the library, the prison, and the graveyard allow Davids to explore unlikely intersections and overlaps between places as far afield as South Africa, America, and Mali. It argues, furthermore, that the ghostly superimpositionality that characterizes Davids' employment of heterotopia collapses distinctions between home and world, history and memory, and text and intertext. In this way, heterotopological spaces offer Davids a peculiarly productive means by which to "float" - to suggest, but also to suspend - forms of memory, literary imaginaries, and ethical potentialities that transect, traverse, and conjoin local and global divides.
ISSN:1753-3171
1543-1304
DOI:10.1080/17533171.2017.1324060